Post Class

We started class off with four opening “sentences”: a short story, “A Short Story”, “A Short Story” For Sale:, and “A short story” For Sale: Baby Shoes… (Hemingway) These examples connected us from De Saussure’s “gaps” to Barthes tmesis. De Saussure says that we have a need to ‘fill in gaps’. We want to fill in gaps and try to make sense of them. The examples above show us how we try to make sense of ‘gaps’ and therefore ‘fill in’ with what eventually makes sense to us. To everyone something else makes different sense and therefore we fill in the gaps differently. For Barthes this is what seems to be important to him, is in between the lines is what is most important. Somebody in class (I forget who) said it perfectly: “Not seeing a whole thing leads to the imaginative.” It gives us a jouissance, what we learnt in class to mean, a pleasure that is derived from the text. I believe these ‘gaps’, these gaps for the imaginative, those that give us pleasure, jouissance, is there because each person, each individual shares different meaning of what pleasure is to them. And this I believe is what leads us into what Macherey is trying to say, that “there always remains the possibility of saying something else.” We can’t ever know what the author is saying, nor can the author know what the readers might think of what he says. Or maybe the things the author does not say means something as well and this space of not being able to say everything because saying everything will lose the space for the reader to derive his own personal pleasure and imagination. This is so beautiful. I loved listening and discussing De Saussure, Barthes and Macherey so far in class. It all makes so much sense and yet can never actually make sense – completely. Or to everyone it makes such different senseJ either way as Macherey would say – “let us all read to misread together.” This is what puts spirit into life, curiosity into nothing, inspiration into art … it lets us imagine what we as individuals like to imagine.